We like to keep our sites really, really fast and obsess over as many performance details as we can. Unfortunately one area where we have little control is in the performance of our advertisements as companies of our size typically outsource this task. We rely on ads for 85% of our revenue, but we are aware that some of these ads degrade our service.

We have decided to launch a new ad-free service. It's available on all of our sites and for $20 you can surf all of our sites ad-free. To sign up see the "AD FREE" link that now appears at the top of every page.

Using this service will make your surfing experience much faster and will continue to support our site.

If you've been browsing recently, you've may have noticed that we added per-100 possession statistics tables to the player pages and team pages (and for both the regular season and playoffs). For now, we're able to estimate team possessions going back to the 1973-74 season.

We also have league-wide tables that correspond to those on the player and team pages, with stats for every player, and even totals for all individual team stints for those players that were traded, re-signed, etc. Sometimes users tend to not to find these but they're extremely useful for sorting or exporting and doing your own analysis.

Here's the easiest way to find those tables: Mouseover the 'seasons' link and click on Per Poss on the dropdown menu:

(Similarly, these are available for the playoffs, as well - corresponding links can be found in the 'playoffs' site section)

Per-Possession statistics are an easy way to nullify the distorting effects of pace and compare players more easily across teams and eras. For the record, we estimate league pace going back to the 1973-74 season using the formula provided in our statistics glosssary, and estimate it for individual teams going back to 1950-51 by estimating component statistics.

We've added a feature to the league and team year pages that allow you to see the average age of team. It is weighted by time on ice, since we feel that is the most accurate representation of the team's "age."

To see this, simply go to either a league or team year page and scroll down to the stats section.

We are beginning to release some new stats on Hockey-Reference that we are lumping together into "Play-by-Play Stats". In this initial release, we are including basic counting stats on the player level -- like Hits, Blocks, Takeaways, and Giveaways -- as well as possession stats like Corsi and Fenwick.

We intend to provide a full introduction to all of these new stats on the site before they come out of beta, but for now take a look at this article over at Grantland. These stats come with a few of caveats, which is why they are being released as "beta":

There are a few games missing from the data that we are working to remedy.

This release only includes individual players. Teams and a Play Index are under development.

Corsi and Fenwick numbers are not scaled to 60 minutes as is standard. These will be added in the future.

The Corsi/Fenwick numbers are only provided for Even Strength situations. Other situations (e.g. SH, PP, 5-on-5 close, etc.) will be provided in the future.

This data only goes back to the 2007-2008 season.

To see these new stats, simply go to a player page of someone that has played since the 2007-08 season and click on the "Additional Stats" tab in their NHL Stats table:

With that in mind, we welcome any feedback and look forward to expanding this area significantly in the off-season.

It's a small thing, but we are always trying to push our data as far back as possible and we've added (thanks to Brian Cartwright and Ted Turocy) Korea Baseball Organization stats back to 1999. This doesn't get us all of Seung-Yeop Lee's career stats, but pretty close.

Positional differences and performance by position are interesting ways to look at team performance. For instance as Phillies fan I know that CF and LF are hurting the Phillies, but just how much are they hurting relative to the league. This tool answers that question and many many more. (answer: a whole lot of hurt)

You select a year, the league and a stat, and we rank every team at each position by that stat and in some cases a summary of positions. This uses our positional splits to allot stats to positions or in some cases a prorated assignment of WAR and related stats by time played at each position. Now in one table you can see the worst or best team-positions in baseball.

There are some additional tools that allow you to highlight a particular team and mousing over a table cell informs you the players involved in producing that value.

I like this output so much I've also added it to our base league pages just below the pitching stats.